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The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a constantly increasing forcefulness.[1] But it was not until the later decades of the eighteenth century that the real opportunity arrived. It was among the alarums and excursions of the amazing period which then began, among its endless industrial sallies and revolutions, its fabulous commercial conquests, that the weapon was for the first time granted the scope it needed to swing with full effect. And therefore it was within a space of extraordinary brevity—within the leaping years of a single century, indeed—that the City achieved its greatness, and assumed the aspect which it wears to-day.

[1]The details of these activities have been set out more perfectly than ever before, and with a union of concision and lucidity which it is impossible to praise too highly, in Professor Ramsay Muir’s recent “History of Liverpool.”

The direct consequences of that are obvious enough. Liverpool becomes, quite frankly, an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its houses are houses, not merely of recent birth, but pioneer houses, planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed meadow-land and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in large measure, a city without ancestors.

That is sufficiently manifest. But what is not so manifest, and what robs these sept-centenary celebrations, these pageants and retrospective ardours, of any too great tincture of incongruity, is the fact that the River which has washed these interior traditions and memorials away has also restored them in another place and form. It has established, at the gates of the City, a far more perdurable monument to antiquity than any that architecture could contrive. For, whilst they are not of the soil, these people, they are all unmistakably of the Mersey. They have discovered a kinship, neither of blood nor of land, but wholly vital and compelling, which binds them not only with one another, but with old ardours and forgotten years. The wide plain of water that pours endlessly about their wharves and piers colours their lives as deeply as it coloured the lives of those who watched its lapse before them: consciously or unconsciously, they acquire something of the ripeness that comes from traffic with old and fateful quantities. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, they inevitably pass into vital touch with the earlier wielders of the weapon: with the dim fisher-folk who were its eldest users; with the cluster of serfs who received their first “charter” of privileges seven hundred years ago; with the Irish traders of the seventeenth century; with the slave-traders of the eighteenth; with the merchants who watched the dawn of the day of the last great onset. The River becomes in this way a kind of Cathedral, a place heavy with traditions, full of the sense of old passions.

This is clearly not the sort of influence that one can measure with a foot-rule or sum up in a syllogism; but in this nuance of endeavour and in that, in characteristics which it would be impossible briefly to define, but which may perhaps appear in the pages which follow, the effect, I feel, is made faintly, delightfully apparent. The sheer youth of the place has been granted something of the dignity of age. The audacities and vigours of the century which gave it birth have been tinged with a certain gravity and largeness. The very force which has made the place so superbly youthful and athletic, so finely unhampered by the rags of outworn modes, has also granted it that intimate sense of history, that heartening and annealing influence of ancient ardours vitally and romantically recalled, without which a city, as a nation, is but an army without music and banners.